Stepping back from a place or a condition you once called your own, a time comes when you alter your language, avoid certain moves, leave a game halfway through. Not that you care less, but it is to see more. A gaze wielded in the interest of a commitment. A decentring chosen in resisting the obvious.

Often, to understand the centre is when you must arrive on the fringes. Unmasked, isolated, vulnerable. Yet to find home from afar is sometimes the most radical act of situating our place in the world. The stories this week examine what comes into focus when we step away.

Cao Fei's Swiss exhibition asks us to disengage from our expectations of what an art gallery should be. Eric Lusito's exploration of abandoned Soviet scientific institutes considers detachment from narratives of permanence. A brick fortress by SOSOKKI ANAC turns coffee drinking into an exercise in detachment, while the site-led practice of Leopold Banchini departs from convention.

How might distance change not what you care about, but how you care?